Postgres Weekly Issue 638: March 4, 2026

#638 — March 4, 2026

Together with

⚠️ Postgres 18.3, 17.9, 16.13, 15.17, and 14.22 Released — An out-of-cycle update to fix regressions introduced by last month's security releases. If you upgraded to 18.0, 18.1, or 18.2 already, you need to pay special attention as a manual step is required to make the json_strip_nulls and jsonb_strip_nulls functions immutable.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

The Schedule is Out for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres! — POSETTE 2026, a free & virtual developer event, is happening June 16-18. The speakers and schedule were just announced! Join experts via 4 livestreams to learn about the world's most advanced open source relational database. Get the details.

Microsoft sponsor

We Have pgvector at Home — A fun bit of spelunking here. Turning to pgvector for your vector similarity searches is a sensible, modern option, but Postgres has a built-in extension that can (sort of) do it too: cube. Phil also surfaces an interesting gem in the shape of model2vec.

Phil Eaton

IN BRIEF:

PgJitter is an interesting experiment to bring different JIT backends (in addition to Postgres's standard approach) to Postgres for faster compilation of queries. 📊 Some benchmark results.
😅 Could you use Postgres as a real-time video conferencing server? The folks at PlanetScale made it happen. A fun technical achievement.
Postgres 19's pg_dumpall is gaining support for dumping in binary formats with pg_restore also extended to handle the new options (more here).
🇺🇸 The program for Postgres Conference 2026, taking place this April 21-23 in San Jose, is now live.
Pgbeam is a new commercial Postgres proxy, targeting AWS users handling traffic across regions globally and who want significantly lower latency while doing so.

Coming to Postgres 19: INSERT .. ON CONFLICT .. DO SELECT — A preview of a quietly significant new feature to retrieve a conflicting row on an upsert rather than just ignoring or updating it. Laurenz explains why this is cleaner and safer than MERGE with some examples and use cases.

Laurenz Albe / CYBERTEC

Mostly Dead is Slightly Alive: Killing Zombie Sessions — I ain't afraid of no ghost! .. but zombie sessions are certainly annoying! This post looks at what keeps them around, how to get rid of them, plus some mitigations.

Lætitia Avrot

📄 Understanding Postgres Performance Limits for Analytics on Live Data Matty Stratton (Tiger Data)

📄 A Hands-On Guide to Semantic Caching with pg_semantic_cache Muhammad Aqeel (pgEdge)

📄 Monitoring Postgres on Windows with PgHero and Docker Joan Frey

📰 Classifieds

🌟 New features being added to the MCP server for Postgres. Don’t miss out, star the project on GitHub to stay up-to-date.

📖 Master Visual Studio Code, and learn over 150 essential tips in this screenshot-packed guide from Louis Lazaris.

RELEASES AND CODE:

pgdsat 2.0: Database Security Assessment Tool — Checks your Postgres cluster for almost a hundred security related matters (like file permissions, config settings, replication setup, etc.) including all recommendations from the CIS compliance benchmark. The output is a report like this.

HexaCluster Corp

pgspot 0.9.2: Spot Vulnerabilities in Postgres Extension Scripts — An analysis tool for SQL scripts that checks for vulnerabilities and best practices.

Sven Klemm (Timescale)

🔎 pg_textsearch 0.6 – BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search extension.
pgvector 0.8.2 – Fixes a buffer overflow with parallel HNSW index builds.
sqlx4k 1.7 – Coroutine-first SQL toolkit with compile-time query validations for Kotlin (supporting Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite).
pgxmock 5.0 – Mock library simulating pgx behavior for testing in Go without a real database connection.
postgresparser v1.1.5 – ANTLR-based pure-Go Postgres SQL parser.
Pigsty 4.2 – RDS-like 'batteries-included' Postgres distribution.
PGQueuer 0.26 – Postgres-based Python job queue library.